Where U.S. Brainpower Tends to Cluster

December 14, 2015

Richard Florida

Creative Class

Brainpower is the fuel that fires today’s tech-driven knowledge economy. But it is also unevenly concentrated across America’s cities and metros, so much so that mayors and policy-makers have developed strategies specifically aimed at increasing their ability to attract, retain, and capture powerful brains.

We already know a lot about where college graduates and the creative class tend to concentrate. An even more rarified category of brainpower is made up of people with advanced graduate and professional degrees. While nearly 40 percent of Americans have a college degree and about a third of workers are members of the creative class, just 11 percent of adults 25 and over have a graduate or professional degree.

But where exactly are these super-brains located?

To get at this, my Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) colleague Karen King used data from the 2011-2013 American Community Survey to identify the geography of the extremely highly educated across all 381 U.S. metros. MPI’s Isabel Ritchie made the maps, and we separated out the results for large metros with over one million people.